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The National
Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on Monday urged UNICEF to always
support state governments that have implementable emergency management
laws in place.

NEMA’s South-West
Zone Coordinator, Iyiola Akande, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)
in Lagos that some state governments were yet to pass emergency laws.
“It is not enough to come up with ad-hoc emergency management policies
without the necessary legislative backup,” he said. “UNICEF should
reach out to governments where the emergency agencies are inactive, to
keep pace with development in other states. For partnership between
government and UNICEF to be result-oriented, it is imperative for state
government to have laws guiding emergency management.”

The NEMA official lamented that the lack of a regulatory document
had made emergency management effort ineffective in some states. He
also suggested the need for UNICEF to come up with a measure that would
ensure that they only deal with governments committed to their
counterpart funding. Mr. Akande noted that some states were already
lagging behind in UNICEF-assisted development projects in the zone. He
urged chief executives of the State Emergency Management Agencies to
ensure that Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with UNICEF was executed.
Mr. Akande restated the agency’s commitment to mitigation of
emergencies through awareness creation and capacity building of
stakeholders. He said the agency had in the last one year trained 1,600
grassroots emergency management volunteers across the zone.